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Preston / Reservoir Adult Community Education |
PRACE |
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interview with Martin Dougiamas
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open sourceWhy did you choose to release your source code - to make your product "open source", instead of creating a commercial product? Isn't open source "just for geeks and hackers"? No - most of the Internet is running on open source programs (Linux, Bind/DNS, Apache, ssh etc). Open source is just a better way to write good software. For one thing you can take better advantage of the energy among your users to help you test and debug existing features, and to create new features. Paying for bits just feels too wierd to me. Finally, because people who are there really WANT to be there, the whole community is just so much more fun. A lot of people tell me they're finally having fun again just downloading and playing with Moodle code, and that's one of the most important things for me. Have you found your users to be useful in developing new features, or finding bugs in the existing code? Very much so, as long as the project is structured
to receive their input. For example, I had to write the code that makes
Moodle translatable, and set up the infrastructure to make translating
relatively easy to get into. But once I did that, Moodle has blossomed
into over 30 different language translations purely because of users donating
their time. It's because of them that Moodle is as successful as it is
today.
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interview with Martin Dougiamas
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How to contact us at Preston/Reservoir Adult Community Education (PRACE) |
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Physical: Merrilands Community Centre, cnr Asquith & Sturdee Streets, Reservoir, 3073. Postal: PO Box 510 |
Phone:
9462 6077 |
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prace.vic.edu.au